Stewart and Colbert’s D.C. Rally Skewers Politics as Usual

Fresh off his Wednesday night grilling of President Barack Obama, Jon Stewart lands in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to headline what will likely be the biggest political gathering of the 2010 election season.

More than 20 cities, galvanized by the rally’s Facebook hub, will hold satellite events. Comedy Central will present the rally live on TV and the web.

To warm up for his portion of the program, Colbert testified last month in character as a right-wing blowhard before a congressional hearing on immigration reform. Schooled in Second City-style improvisational comedy, Colbert then appeared on Late Show With David Letterman to attack the Restore Sanity gathering as “crazy.”

“How do you rally for moderation?” he asked. “The price of liberty is vigilance and paranoia!”

New media consultant Jonah Perreti told Wired.com in a phone interview that the intensely polarized nature of political discourse in the United States helps pave the way for Colbert’s reality-blurring persona.

“Instead of people with measured opinions, you’ve got commentators like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann who are almost caricatures unto themselves,” he said. “It’s as if they’re playing a role and getting rewarded for becoming a poster child for a particular movement. That makes it easier for somebody like Colbert to say, ‘Why don’t I play a fictitious character too, but do it in a satirical way?'”

Two years after the Wall Street debacle, banks literally rubber-stamp foreclosure notices while paying their executives $1.6 billion in bonus cash. Self-congratulatory government bureaucrats can’t figure out how to tackle the Gulf oil spill catastrophe with a fraction of the humanity, smarts or common sense demonstrated by Chilean officials in their handling of that country’s mining disaster.

Elected officials privately revel in graft while publicly pretending to serve the public by advancing the agendas of their secret benefactors.

In a season of political discontent, neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to match the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on at least one count: telling the truth.